“Don’t get any ideas,” she said. “Although, mm-mm-mm. What says turn-on to a police gal more than cleaning up a crime scene?” The credenza was full, so Nikki set an armful of files on the desktop, and when she did, her arm grazed the space bar on Rook’s keyboard, causing the screen saver to vanish. The Dude disappeared, exposing the Google search results for “Petar Matic Nikki Heat.”
Rook wasn’t sure she saw it, and he closed his laptop, muttering something about getting it out of her way. If she had seen it, she didn’t let on. Rook forced himself to wait a few moments, working in silence. After a decent interval, he transitioned to shelving books, then casually dropped in a “Hey, I tried calling you last night but you didn’t answer.”
“I know” was all she said.
When they left the Later On studios the night before, Rook had pushed for a dinner date but she wasn’t up for it, telling him that she was exhausted from the evening before.
“You mean our sex?” he had asked.
“Oh, yes, Rook, you wore me out.”
“Really?”
“Feel good about you. If you recall, I had an altercation with the Texan right before our night of bliss. Followed by a pretty full day of trooping around on this investigation.”
“I did all those things, too.”
She crinkled her brow. “Pardon me, but did you actually fight with Tex? I thought it was more like sitting down in a chair and tipping over.”
“You wound me, Nikki. You lash me with your mockery.”
“No,” she had said with undisguised lust, “that was the sash from my robe.” It only made him ache all the more to share another night with her. But, as ever, Nikki Heat was protective of her independence. He’d taken a sulking cab ride back to Tribeca, his writer’s imagination filling his head with possible consequences of reunited college sweethearts exchanging phone numbers.
He slid a volume of his Oxford English Dictionary into its home and said, “I almost didn’t call. I was afraid I’d wake you up.” He put another blue OED next to its companion before he added, “Because you said you were going to sleep.”
“Are you checking up on me?”
“Me? Get real.”
“I’ll tell you if you want to know.”
“Nik, I don’t need to know.”
“Because I wasn’t home asleep when you called. I was out.” For an avid poker player, he was masking his tells about as well as Roger Rabbit after a swig of whiskey. At last, she said, “I couldn’t sleep so I went to the precinct. I wanted to run a check through an FBI database searching specific weapons and duct tape and persons with a history of torture. Sometimes an MO will jump out. I got nowhere last night, but I connected with an agent at the National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico who’s going to stay on it and see what kicks. I also got them the fingerprint partials we pulled off the typewriter ribbon.”
“So all that time you were working?”
“Not all that time,” she said.
So there it was. She had seen the Google screen. Or maybe she hadn’t and she actually had connected with Petar. “Are you trying to torture me, Detective Heat?”
“Is that what you want, Jameson? Do you want me to torture you?” And with that, she finished her coffee and took her cup back to the kitchen.
“It’s the code, man,” said Ochoa. “It’s that stupid code that keeps people from helping us.” He and his partner Raley sat in the front seat of their unmarked across the street from the Moreno Funeral Parlor at 127th and Lex.
The door to the funeral home was still idle, so Raley let his gaze wander up the block to watch a MetroNorth train on the elevated tracks slowing for the Harlem station, last stop before depositing its freight of morning commuters from Fairfield County at Grand Central. “It makes no sense. Especially when it’s family. I mean, they must know we’re trying to find whoever killed their own kin.”
“Doesn’t have to make sense, Rales. The code says you don’t snitch, no matter what.”
“But whose code? Padilla’s family doesn’t show any banger ties.”
“Don’t have to. It’s in the culture. It’s in the music, it’s on the street. Even if snitching doesn’t get you whacked, it makes you the lowest. Nobody wants to be that. That’s the rule.”
“So what can we hope to do then?”